£4,000,000 FROM A HORSECLIPPER.

Taranaki Daily News, 22 April 1922, Page 12

£4,000,000 FROM A HORSECLIPPER.

ROMANTIC INVENTION OF THE SPEEDOMETER. When John K. Stewart, society man, known to fame as the inventor of the speedometer, died five years ago he left a fortune of more man £1,600,000, says the New York correspondent of the Daily Chronicle. No one suspected his humble origin as Terence or Denis O’Brien, nor that the forerunner of the speedometer that is part of the essential equipment of every motor vehicle in the world was a horse-clipping machine. These secrets might never have been disclosed to the world but for litigation over his will, which bequeathed his entire estate to his daughter Marion, now Mrs. Roberet B. Honeyman, Jun. O’Brien, it appears, was born in Vermont 47 years ago, and went West when a boy to seek his -fortune with two other youths of Irish parentage, Arthur and Michael Conlon, with whom he formed a partnership. Their objective was the gold-mining fields of California, but their quest for the precious metal was a failure. Reduced to hunting for a, job at anything, they obtained employment as horse clippers. Young O’Brien found the work hard and tiresome, and to make it easier he conceived the idea of a flexible shaft, which he adapted to the hand-clipper. That was the start of his fortune, which at one time was estimated at £4.000,000. So well did the flexible shaft work that O’Brien tried it on other appliances with equally satisfactory results, I and he decided to patent the device, ' which he did through a lawyer named Stewart. It brought him in a good deal of • money, and about this time, for reasons not made clear, he decided to change his name. He adopted that of the lawyer and of a famous racehorse of the time called “John K.” Then he married. From the flexible shaft came the idea of the speedometer, and to manufacture it he founded the Stewart-Warner Speedometer Company, of Chicago. The romantic story was revealed through a suit alleging mismanagement of the estate, brought against the executors by Mrs. Honey man. Examination of legal records brought to light the inventor’s change of name and the circumstances of his early career.